mcelroy
lab

mcelroy
labmcelroy
labmcelroy
lab

Our lab studies some of the world’s most deadly viruses.

What we do

We study viruses you might have heard of, such as Ebola or Lassa and others that you may never have heard of such as Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) and Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV). All of these viruses fall into a group generally called the VHF (Viral hemorrhagic fevers).

The VHF’s get their name because they sometimes (not always) cause disease in people that manifests as bleeding. This can take several forms, it could be oozing from IV sites, vomiting blood, having blood in the stool, or oozing blood from mucous membranes such as the mouth or the nose. While this sounds very scary, it isn’t necessarily the bleeding that makes the disease so severe! When people die, they die from shock (poor blood flow to the organs due to low blood pressure), which leads to organ failure and this leads to death. Our goal is to understand how the VHF’s make people sick so that we can design therapies that will improve patient outcomes.

How we do it

Human disease

We use primarily derived human samples to try to understand the pathophysiology of disease. The goal is to use this information to develop hypotheses about why some people get sick and others don’t. We focus our studies on various aspects of human physiology that are clearly clinically disrupted in patients with VHF; this includes aspects of endothelial function, coagulation pathways, inflammation and both innate and adaptive immune function. Only by understanding what is going right (or wrong) in the host can we begin to design therapeutics to augment or abrogate the effect.

Animal modelling

While VHF’s can be quite deadly, they are (fortunately) not the most common viruses and special challenges accompany them- they require high biosafety levels and additional regulatory oversight. Since access to primary human samples can be difficult, an alternative is to model the disease in an animal. The added benefit of animal modeling is that hypotheses can be rigorously tested and therapeutic interventions can be evaluated. We have used the mouse model of RVFV to demonstrate that CD4 T cells are important for preventing viral encephalitis, which is a known complication of RVFV disease in humans.

In vitro modelling

Sometimes the quickest way to understand why a virus is pathogenic is to study the virus in cells in the laboratory. This principle certainly applies to RVFV. This virus encodes a protein (NSs) that is known to antagonize the interferon signaling system. Viruses that are missing this protein turn out to be completely non-pathogenic and have become the basis for several RVFV vaccines that are under development for use in livestock.